Wrong letters (bad character set) in Gmail since redesign – solved

Have you also noticed that the mails sent from your Gmail account (or Gmail for Apps) is not the same after the big design change? Usually some special local characters are missing or are displayed incorectly, for exmpale for Slovenian ‘?’, ‘š’, and ‘ž’, for Czech similar ‘š’ and others, for Polish ‘?’, ”?’ or ‘?’ and others. These characters used to be dislayed normally before the design change.

You have probably tried to revert the design back to the previous one, but the errors still occur.

The reason for this is that with the new design the setting for the default character encoding in sent mails changed. I don’t know the reason for this, but I think it must be a bug.

The solution is simple: When logged in to your Gmail account, click the icon for Settings in top right screen corner (there are two, and any of them will do) and click “Settings” or “Mail settings”. In “General” tab find this setting “Outgoing message encoding:” and select “Use Unicode (UTF-8) encoding for outgoing messages”. This should fix the wrong characters in Gmail.